Five minute activity for students

Lessons are not always serious stuff, right?

Well, if they were, your students might be bored to death.

Here is an activity that every teacher can do in classroom, as fillers, introductions or concluding activities, so that children can have fun for a while, and be alert for your lessons. Parents also, who would like to give their kids something to work on while they finish some job, can do this.

Here you go.

The kangaroo word game

This activity can be done with almost any age-group of children. Here are the steps.

You write a long word on the board. For example, ‘examinations’ or ‘hippopotamus’

Ask students to make smaller words out of this big word. For example, man, nation, mat etc. can be made from the word ‘examinations’.

The rule is that the words they make should have letters only from the big word.

Any letter from the big word can be used any number of times.

Words can be of just one letter, two letters, three letters…any number of letters. For example, take the word ‘examinations’. The one-letter word ‘a’ can be made. Examples for two letter words are ‘at’ ‘an’ etc. students can make words with any number of letters. For example, they could make ‘nation’ or station’. Singular and plural will be counted as two words. For example, ‘mat’ and ‘mats’ are two words. The same goes for present tense and past tense. Thus, ‘sit’ and ‘sat’ count as two words.

Give a time frame, perhaps five minutes, or ten minutes.

At the end of the given time frame, ask students to exchange their work with their neighbours, for counting the number of words.

No word can be repeated. Also, words in languages other than English are not accepted. However, if they appear in the dictionary, they can be accepted.

Whoever makes the maximum number of words is the winner!

Now did you realise why the game is called the kangaroo word game?
Well, this kangaroo has so many words in its tummy pouch!!!

There are variations of this game.

Variation 1

Ask your students to make only two letter, or only three letter words and so on. This means that you specify the number of letters in each word they should make. This makes the game more challenging, and gives more exercise to the brain.

Variation 2

Specify the first letter of the words that students should make. For example, they could make words with the letter ‘m’ only, (e.g. ‘mat’ ‘at’). Alternatively, students could be asked to make words that end in a certain letter, such as ‘n’ for example. They could make ‘man’, ‘tan’ etc.

Don’t forget to reward your winners with a token prize. Children love rewards!